This week, Gmail celebrated its 5th birthday with the international launch of Gmail Labs, a quirky experimental feature playground. To mark the occasion, we held a press conference in Brussels to talk about how Gmail has evolved from its beginnings as a straightforward email service to the robust and flexible communications product we offer users today. Here's a quick recap of the event for all of those who attended by about 40 journalists. Our Director of Product Management Eric Tholome put Gmail in context by giving a short history of computing, noting how we moved from the mainframe to personal computers, and from being disconnected to becoming a part of a network via the Internet. Using the power of the Web, many applications today including email, calendars, and online photo albums now can be run from within a browser over the Internet, or "in the cloud." This transformation is analogous to the creation of the electric grid a century ago. Before, everyone owned their own electricity generator. Now that seems inefficient and unnecessary. Working in the cloud also eliminates the annoyance of manually keeping software up-to-date. Instead of relying on each individual to upgrade his or her software, a web-based application receives new features, security patches, and general updates from the server-side. Users can stop worrying about running updates: they will always see the newest version. Gmail, a web-based service, is a good example. Hundreds of changes have been launched since 2004, and users simply saw the newest version every time they logged on. These new features include increased storage space, video chat, and updated interface, and more. At the event, Product Manager Christian Miccio introduced the crowd to Gmail Labs, a set of experimental features that you can turn on to modify how your Gmail works. Initially launched in English in June, 2008, Gmail Labs has launched 43 features in 43 weeks - including features like Offline Gmail, Tasks, Mail Goggles, Undo Send, and the Forgotten Attachment Detector. Such a rapid launch schedule, Christian noted, could only happen for a cloud-based application. And now, with the launch of Gmail Labs in 47 new languages, users globally can play with these features in their local languages. If you are unfamiliar with Gmail Labs experiments, which can be turned on and off individually with a few clicks of the mouse, take a look at the video below for a brief introduction. To set up a Gmail account, just click and get started. To turn on Gmail Labs features, go to the Settings link in the top right, then navigate to the Labs tab within the window. f you haven't tried Gmail Labs yet, we encourage you to play around - there's a feature (or two!) for everyone. Posted by William Echikson, Senior Manager, Communications and Kasia Chmielinski, Communications Associate
Happy birthday and thank you for such a great project and ideas
ReplyDeleteMany Many Happy Returns of the Day!!
ReplyDeleteWish you all the best... all your projects, applications, new ideas mobile links are the best..
wishing your team future success and looking forward towards greater heights of technological advancement..
Regards
Bhaskar Varma
www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarvarma
Congratulations guys. Any idea when it's gonna come out of Beta or is that just a part of the logo now ;o)
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